In 2014, when my whole life was breaking apart, I wrote a piece of prose/flash fiction called The Demented World. You’ll notice that, on the homepage, it doesn’t have one of these pages but rather just the collection of posts, collected under the category. That’s because it haunts me; I can’t bring myself to revisit it and write one of these intros for it.
It was a really dark time in my life. It involved a relationship of many years ending, a relationship around which I had built my inner world. “The Demented World” is me burning that world to the ground, basically a tantrum, metaphorical furniture being thrown as my rage, betrayal, and self doubt were given flight. I didn’t sleep, I cried all day, and I wrote. Sometimes I really didn’t want to write but I couldn’t stop; some of the stuff in there is written from anguish.
But then, in 2017, I started The Augmented World. I didn’t intend it as a response to that previous piece of work; I was starting my infatuation with magic realism back then and wanted to give that place a venting vector. But then, when I sat down to actually write it, the title just flowed from my fingers and I realized that this was to be part of my healing process, already well under way back then. This paralleled my own psychological turn to magic realism as a way to combat nihilism, as a way to balance it with a brighter and more willful outlook on life.
Thus, The Augmented World is my attempt to imagine a more beautiful world, made beautiful because it has ugliness within it. It’s an attempt to reconnect with a naive, hopeful, gleeful side of myself. It’s also what I mentioned above; an homage to the greats of the genre and a place for me to let my flights of fancy take shape.
Working Title 